MACSEM 2015 Conference Program (Preliminary, Released 3/5/15)

8:00-8:15 AM Reception and Registration Coffee, Tea, Bagels, Danish, Muffins

8:15 AM Welcome, Andy (MACSEM President) and David (Local Arrangements Chair)

8:30-10:30 Session 1: Transformations in Religious Music: Superstructures, Subcultures and Subjectivities
Chair: Jane Sugarman, CUNY

1.1) Secular-Sacred Interface: The Cultural Performance of Lisu Farmer Choir and Representation of Minority Music in Yunnan’s Northwestern Nujiang Prefecture, China

Emma Diao, University of Maryland, College Park
1.2) “Elimize Elde (It’s in Our Hands)”: New Voices in Alevi Religious Practice

Melanie Pinkert, University of Maryland, College Park
1.3) Spatial Transformation of Sufi Music Practice in Istanbul and Repositioning of Subjectivities

Juan Castrillon, University of Pennsylvania
1.4) New and Changing Performance Contexts for the Dominican Fiesta de Palos Víctor Hernández-Sang, University of Maryland, College Park

10:30-10:45 Break

10:45-12:45 Session 2: Materialities and Music Circulation

Chair: Aaron Fox, Columbia University.

2.1) K7, CD, MP3: Fading Nostalgia and Shifting Materialities Among Music Vendors and Distributors in the Markets of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Juan Carlos Melendez-Torres, Independent Scholar

2.2) Sound, City, Soil: Translocal Infrastructures of Sonic Circulation in Contemporary China

Adam Kielman, Columbia University

2.3) The Bottomline$ of Broadcasting While You Twerk: The Digital Seduction of Girls' 'Net Worth at the Intersection of Race and Gender in YouTube Music.

Dr. Kyra Gaunt, Ph.D., Baruch College-CUNY 12:30-1:30 Lunch Provided by NYU Music Department

1:30-3:30 Session 3: Making Place
Chair: Timothy Rommen, University of Pennsylvania.

3.1) “Marseille has always been a cultural capital”: Performing Occitan History and Resistance in Provence

Sarah Trouslard, CUNY Graduate Center

3.2) Mexican Activist Musicians and the Transformation of Son Jarocho in New York City

Emily Williamson, CUNY Graduate Center

3.3) ‘Representing BK To The Fullest’: Hip-Hop Heritage, Gentrification, And The Politics Of Memorialization In Brooklyn

Kathryn Radishofski, Columbia University
3.4) Jī Latīf: Sung Sufi Poetry in the Kachchh-­Sindh Borderlands

Brian Bond, CUNY Graduate Center 3:30-3:45 Break

3:45-5:30 Session 4: Negotiating American Traditions Chair: Peter Manuel, CUNY

4.1) Struttin’ Down Broad Street: Ferko String Band and Musical Legacy in the City of Brotherly Love.

Karen L. Uslin, The Catholic University of America

4.2) Musically Mediating a Shared Indianness: Wedding Music and the Assertion and Negotiation of Indian-American Identity

Nandini Banerjee, Columbia University

4.3) Ethnographic Inflections in John Cage’s Roaratorio, An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake

Ivan Goff, New York University

DINNER ON YOUR OWN OR IN GROUPS

Sunday, March 29
8:15-8:45 Coffee, tea, muffins

8:45-10:40 Session 5: State-Sponsored Musicking Chair: Maureen Mahon, NYU

5.1) Sounding Japan-China Relations: Hearing Imperialism in the 1939 Film Song of the White Orchid

Nathanial Gailey-Schiltz, University of Maryland, College Park

5.2) Song to Romania: The Biopolitics of a Socialist Spectacle

Ben Dumbauld, CUNY Graduate Center

5.3) Ethnomusicology and Royalty: an Unprecedented Organological Study Presented by a Spanish Princess at the End of the 19th Century

Maria Luisa Martínez Martínez, Universidad de Jaén, Spain & The Foundation for Iberian Music, CUNY Graduate Center

5.4) “It’s not a mirage this time”: Museums, Performance, and the Production of Space in “Rue Créole”

Laura Donnelly, University of Pennsylvania

10:45-11:00 Break

11:00-11:45 MACSEM 2015 Keynote: Dr. Georgina Born

11:45-12:30 Lunch provided by NYU Music Department.

12:30-2:30 Session 6: Dimensions of Traditional Performance Chair: Stephen Blum, CUNY

6.1) Indexing morality: voice, self, and divine guidance in mabebasan literary performance

Nicole Reisnour, Cornell University

6.2) A Heretic Becomes a Hero: Korean (Traditional) Musicians in a Transnational Circuit

Hyunjin Yeo, University of Maryland, College Park
6.3) Transmission, Tradition, and Translation in the Iraqi Maqām Bradford J. Garvey, CUNY Graduate Center

6.4) Examples of vocal and instrumental music of the Gilan Sara Banihashemi, University of Hamburg
2:30-2:45 Break
2:45-4:00 MACSEM BUSINESS MEETING

***PANTALEONI PRIZE COMPETITION***

MACSEM awards the Pantaleoni Prize each year to the best student paper delivered at the annual meeting, as determined by the vote of an ad hoc committee of faculty present at the meeting, appointed by the President. The Pantaleoni Prize was established in 1990 in memory of ethnomusicologist Hewitt Pantaleoni, and carries a cash award. All graduate student MACSEM presenters are strongly encouraged to enter their papers into the competition.

HOW TO APPLY:
Email a copy of your paper (AS READ) by 3pm on Sunday, March 29, 2015 to amcgraw@richmond.edu.

Please include in the email subject line: Pantaleoni Prize

_______________

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Georgina Born
Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford,

2013-15 Visiting Schulich Chair of Music, McGill University 2014 Bloch Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Digital Musics and Social Relations: Entrepreneurialism, Experimental Economies, and Musical Labor from Nairobi and Buenos Aires to Gujarat and Montreal

In this lecture I begin by asking: how should we understand music’s social mediation? Ethnomusicology has long known, and all the music disciplines now recognise, that we need a social musicology. But while this is so, the nature of this ‘social’ is undecided. On the one hand are deterministic and macrosociological approaches like Bourdieu’s analysis of class and musical taste; on the other are microsociologies of musical process and emergence. More widely, the question of theorising the social has generated a crisis in social theory, eliciting responses from such figures as Marilyn Strathern and Bruno Latour, both of whom proffer a new topos of the social that could be taken to music. Productively, Strathern and Latour acknowledge the plural ‘cartographies of the social’; yet they pose, without solving, the problem of their interrelations. As a way forward, I set out a novel methodology for the analysis of music’s social mediation in the terms of an assemblage, relating this to a series of takes from ethnographic research on digital music cultures worldwide. The studies come from a research programme called ‘Music, Digitisation, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies’, funded by the European Research Council, which examines the wide-ranging changes to musical practices afforded by digitisation and digital media in Argentina, Canada, Cuba, India, Kenya and the UK. From aesthetic entrepreneurialism in Nairobi, to the declining local music economies in Buenos Aires; from the inequalities stoking a politics of digital archiving of oral vernacular musics in Gujarat and Rajasthan, to the experimental economies created by noise musicians in Montreal––the lecture offers a portrait and an analysis of the inventive socialities manifest as music becomes subject to intensifying digitisation. The effect is to show how music and musical practices engender and orchestrate socialities that would not exist outside of their animation by music; while also indicating how wider social relations and social formations get into, and may be transformed or refracted by, music.

Georgina Born is Professor of Music and Anthropology at Oxford University. From 2013-15 she is Schulich Distinguished Visiting Professor in Music at McGill University, and in 2014 she was Bloch Visiting Professor in Music at the University of California, Berkeley. Earlier, she was active as a performer and improviser, playing with Henry Cow, Derek Bailey’s Company and the Feminist Improvising Group among others. Professor Born’s work combines ethnographic and theoretical writings on music, media and cultural production. Her books are Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (1995), Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music (edited with D. Hesmondhalgh, 2000)), Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (2005), Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience (CUP, 2013), and Interdisciplinarity (edited with A. Barry, Routledge, 2013). She directs the research program ‘Music, Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies’, funded by the European Research Council, which examines the transformation of music and musical practices by digitization and digital media through ethnographies in six countries in the developing and developed worlds. Her article ‘For a relational musicology: Music and interdisciplinarity, beyond the practice turn’ (JRAI 2010) was the focus of an AMS/SEM/SMT plenary panel at the joint societies’ 2012 meeting.

ABSTRACTS (in order of presentation)

Secular-Sacred Interface: The Cultural Performance of Lisu Farmer Choir and Representation of Minority Music in Yunnan’s Northwestern Nujiang Prefecture, China Emma Diao, University of Maryland, College Park

The Lisu are a transnational ethnic group of over one million people, who reside mainly in China’s southwestern Yunnan Province, Myanmar, Thailand, and India. In China, they are identified as a national minority with the greatest concentration in Yunnan’s northwestern Nujiang Prefecture on the China-Myanmar border. Protestant Christianity was introduced to the Nujiang Lisu over a century ago. The Lisu hymnody tradition throughout the region is diverse. More recently, there are some new variations. This paper investigates one manifestation of such transformation: the tourist performance of Nujiang Lisu farmer choir, a Christian-based musical tradition developed just over the last two decades. Firstly, I will trace the history of Lisu farmer choir’s rise to fame in the 1990s. Then I will select several examples of the choir’s tourist performances and summarize the general features of these stage shows as well as their concealed meanings addressed to audiences, with particular interest in the Christian Lisu’s strategies for making compromises between their religious needs and those of the government. In addition to performative analysis, I will also discuss the ways in which heritage, religion, and ethnicity are constructed through cultural performances, as well as how the ideology of representing minority music has changed the meaning of hymns that have been part of long-standing religious practices of the Christian Lisu. The present study further demonstrates the Lisu farmer choir as a newly invented regional

tradition helps to present a distinct image of the minority Christian outside the church. “Elimize Elde (It’s in Our Hands)”: New Voices in Alevi Religious Practice

Melanie Pinkert, University of Maryland, College Park

In the late 1980s the re-emergence of Alevism – the faith of Turkey’s largest ethnic minority group – began with public declarations of Alevi rights in Hamburg and Istanbul. These new expressions of a once-suppressed religion enabled the rise of worship houses (cemevis) in a transnational network linking Turkish and European cities. Over the last quarter-century, these religious practices, as conducted by established spiritual leaders (dedes) and administrators, are gradually becoming more controlled and homogenized. However, not all Alevi leaders have found satisfying articulations of faith in urban cemevis. This paper discusses two individuals who have creatively resisted the standardization trend of urban Alevism; Cevahir Canpolat, president of a small grass-roots Alevi association in Ankara, and Dertli Divani, musician and spiritual leader in cities in Turkey and in Europe, have developed their own paths of leadership, counteracting the tendency to uniformity. I suggest that De Certeau’s theory of strategy and tactics in The Practice of Everyday Life is an effective framework to examine how these leaders make Alevism their own in the wake of emerging power structures around urban cemevis. First, I trace the developments of the Alevi socio-religious revival, highlighting changes wrought by urban migration. Then, I compare urban cemevi practices with the approaches of Canpolat and Divani. Finally, I demonstrate the links between these innovators and a return to the basic Alevi values of self-critique and harmony in social relationships – codes of behavior that are within the grasp of all community members.

Spatial Transformation of Sufi Music Practice in Istanbul and Repositioning of Subjectivities
Juan Castrillon, University of Pennsylvania

This paper analyzes pedagogical roles of Sufi music in current Istanbul based on socio- spatial reorganizations imposed by the Turkish State on the Ottoman society in 1930s, and their impact on musicians’ subjectivities. The main topic is that reorganization of places for musical learning in Istanbul opened an unsuspected strategy to relocate musical genealogies based on religious certainties. In this sense, the character of musical pedagogy offered by music conservatoires and the organization of faculties themselves, can be interpreted as an opportunity to relocate teaching principles applied by Ottoman musical institutions. Rather than closing down the entry of other systems for musical pedagogies, this change meant another resignification of the argument between secularism and ethnicity among teachers and students of Ottoman instruments. Initially I show how socio-spatial transformations have specific resonances on subjectification processes and how the Turkish Republic reform impacted dynamics of place production associated with Sufi orders. Later, I develop the relation between place, listening practices and Muslim mysticism during the period of political change in order to introduce those new scenarios where the Sufi music practice role is negotiated. Finally, in addition to genealogical analysis of Ney reed flute program at the Istanbul Technical University Conservatory in the last four decades, I will demonstrate how re- ethnicization or re-enchantment of cultural practices in Anatolia is not a recent subject, but another inflection axis where teachers, musicians and audiences face up to the establishment seeking to reposition themselves in the contemporary context of this musical history.

New and Changing Performance Contexts for the Dominican Fiesta de Palos Víctor Hernández-Sang, University of Maryland, College Park

Palo (long drum) music is an essential element of the rituals of the Afro-Dominican religion, La Veintiuna División. During these ritual celebrations, palo music facilitates communication between devotees and their misterios (saints). Recently, palo musicians have also moved into secular settings, performing in non-liturgical contexts like cultural

centers and discos. In these new performance contexts, some palo ensembles have added new instruments to their music, which are not accepted in the sacred context. This paper, based on ethnographic field research in Santiago, explores the ways that palo musicians navigate these new professional contexts without alienating believers. Although Katherine Hagedorn (2001) conducted research on the Cuban context where Santería is folkloricized, the Dominican case has not been closely examined. As performers have moved among sacred and secular contexts, performing for believers and nonbelievers alike, they have developed discursive strategies and metaphors for their participation that allows them to generate these flexible identities as performers. I argue that these flexible metaphors and identities for palo music and palo musicians have developed in response to the long-term strained political relationship with Haiti, and the Hispanicist ideology prevalent in the Dominican Republic. Until the 1960s, intellectuals and politicians systematically denied and controlled African-descent traditions through decrees such as the Código Negro Carolino. As a result, practitioners of la Ventiuna División have developed a flexible and pragmatic approach to music in ritual context, and musicians have adopted their music as a symbol of national identity and folklore, and as a professional activity in new contexts.

K7, CD, MP3: Fading Nostalgia and Shifting Materialities Among Music Vendors and Distributors in the Markets of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
Juan Carlos Melendez-Torres, Independent Scholar

The supply chain of the music industry in Burkina Faso finds itself at the nexus of an extraordinarily complicated confluence of rapidly evolving technologies, materialities, and patterns of consumption. These shifts have largely left vendors and distributors of music struggling to earn a livelihood, a stark contrast to the stable (if not lucrative) profits that were earned before the turn of the 21st century. However, the cataclysmically rapid move from physical to digital media within the past few years has effectively crushed economic profits among merchants of music in Ouagadougou. Unlike western music industries, which saw the cassette increasingly challenged by the CD in the late 1980s, followed by the rise of the mp3 in the early 2000s, Burkina Faso’s music industry has largely shifted from cassettes to CDs to digital media all in the past eight years, with the most rapid changes occurring after 2010. The additional impact of piracy has only compounded the problems for these economic actors. Reactions to these new circumstances and proposed strategies for dealing with them vary widely, but there is at least one common strain among vendors and distributors: a committed belief in the inherent value of physical media in spite of all the economic signals pointing to the end of a technological era. This paper explores the narratives of Ouagalais music vendors and distributors regarding the personal and sociocultural materiality of the physical and digital media sold in the past, present, and future of Burkinabé music.

Sound, City, Soil: Translocal Infrastructures of Sonic Circulation in Contemporary China
Adam Kielman, Columbia University

From the integrated network of wired radio in the early days of the PRC to the global garbage trade that delivered the dakoudie (cut-out surplus CDs and cassettes) consumed by a generation of musicians and listeners, circulations of sound through material and media infrastructures have reinforced particular ways of thinking about space and of understanding the nested relationships between rural and urban, local and national, and Chinese and global. Against this backdrop, this paper focuses on two bands based in Guangzhou and the evolving music industry in which they participate. My analysis puts insights from sound studies and the anthropology of the senses (Erlmann 2004; Porcello et al 2010) in dialogue with approaches from the anthropology of infrastructure (Larkin 2013). I discuss the material, social, and sonic linkages that connect independent musicians in Guangzhou to musicians and audiences in other cities in China, and to the rural areas many of these musicians come from and still look to for musical inspiration. Though sound—taken broadly to include soundscapes, music, and language (Faudree 2012; Samuels et al. 2010)—has long been a central agent in the affective constitution of subjectivities and nation in China, the infrastructures that circulate sounds have transformed dramatically in recent decades. I argue that a key characteristic of new infrastructures of sonic circulation is that they are translocal (Oakes and Schein 2006), and that they reveal and contribute to new conceptions of the local and new mobilities in postsocialist China.

The Bottomline$ of Broadcasting While You Twerk: The Digital Seduction of Girls' 'Net Worth at the Intersection of Race and Gender in YouTube Music.
Kyra Gaunt, Baruch College-CUNY

YouTube’s “Broadcast Yourself” attention economy is increasingly driven by content from large media companies. Nine out of ten of YouTube’s most watched videos are distributed by VEVO and its currency is now traded on Billboard’s YouTube charts.

YouTube’s music increasingly earns its assets off the backs of user-generated content; in the case of twerking it is adolescent girls who “make it rain” from the “privacy” of their bedrooms. This paper interrogates the intersection of race and gender in this music media ecology based on a study of 1000 videos of adolescent black girls twerking on YouTube. All too often we come to the study of digital media as we have prior social media in radio, film, and TV; we fail to examine how the musical agency of social actors is shaped and coopted by the persistence of patriarchy and white superiority.
Searching for “twerking” elicits about 1,550,000 results. The first few pages are usually of white girls though black girls’ began broadcasting as early as 2006. This paper also explores how the “eyeballs” and asses of females 13-17 and 18-24 tends to drive YouTube’s neoliberal economy; a musical economy of sonic and visual memes infected by the sexual objectification of girls’ own bodies. Couple this with the usual industry tactics of lyrical hooks and earworms, and it becomes critical that we begin to examine the seduction of not only girls’ eyes and asses but also the voicelessness of racial and gendered subjects in music and in life.

“Marseille has always been a cultural capital”: Performing Occitan History and Resistance in Provence
Sarah Trouslard, CUNY Graduate Center

For the majority of musicians who choose to do so, singing in Occitan is an act of resistance. Approximately 1.5 million people in France speak Occitan, a language most commonly associated with the medieval troubadours, but which exists today as a conglomerate of southern French regional dialects, such as Provencal. While there is debate as to the legitimacy of labeling Occitan a unified language, for a plethora of musical groups in southern France, singing in “Occitan” conveys, at the minimum, a southern French identity, and accompanies a discourse that challenges Paris-based centralism and often embraces multiculturalism. As part of their resistance to the concept of a culturally uniform France, many Occitan musicians are engaged in fieldwork or historical research on the musical traditions of their place of residence, whether in the major cities of the south or in the countryside. This paper will focus on musicians based in or near Marseille, which in 2013 was designated a European Capital of Culture. The critical reactions to this event of Manu Theron and Tatou, two musicians prominent in the Occitan music scene, provide the entryway into my discussion of their work to promote local identity through their excavation and performance of Provençal cultural history. Their opinions and those of other Occitan musicians provide a perspective in the ongoing debate in France on national identity.

Mexican Activist Musicians and the Transformation of Son Jarocho in New York City

Emily Williamson, CUNY Graduate Center

The music of immigrant communities is often analyzed for the way it transmits nostalgia for the “homeland.” Previously, music scholarship has examined son jarocho as a protest music and as a localized, folk style from Veracruz, Mexico, not in terms of immigration. However, son jarocho has taken on new meaning since it has gained international popularity that has yet to be studied. Using ethnographic examples, this paper will demonstrate the connection between son jarocho’s diverse histories and today’s New York-based musical activists who are teaching this music to Mexican immigrants and non-Mexican New Yorkers. In New York City, son jarocho musicians are actively engaging with communities not only to teach son jarocho but also to build relationships and connections among people from disparate backgrounds: working- class immigrants from Puebla, Mexico, middle-class immigrants from places like Guadalajara or Mexico City, and non-Mexican New Yorkers. My informants practice son jarocho and, more broadly, music as an expression of connectivity and solidarity with others regardless of citizenship status or social position. Thus, I argue that the activist son jarocho musician is engaging with music in a transformative way—one that acknowledges both past and present to create a music that is contingent upon existing cultural networks in New York. Moreover, these musicians are making music that has clear roots in the son jarocho tradition but does not look back to Mexico as the nostalgic place of return. Rather, it is a musical practice that is relevant to their lived experience in New York.

‘Representing BK To The Fullest’: Hip-Hop Heritage, Gentrification, And The Politics Of Memorialization In Brooklyn
Kathryn Radishofski, Columbia University

The salient subtexts circulating through the discourse on Leroy McCarthy’s petition to rename the corner of Fulton Avenue and St. James place after the late, renowned rapper the Notorious B.I.G. map the affective entanglements associated with articulating the hip-hop’s legacy in Brooklyn; in interfacing with official culture, these mediated narratives also engage a larger, ongoing dialogue over which racial groups have the power, or the historically sanctioned “right,” to live in and shape the borough. In seeking to illuminate the present contours of racial negotiations over space Brooklyn, this paper builds on and breaks new ground in scholarship dealing with the history of popular polemics surrounding hip-hop culture, investigating the ways its moral anxiety

and expedience to the circumscription of black public space inflect the discursive formations orbiting McCarthy’s project at a moment when development is rapidly transforming Brooklyn visually, structurally, and socially. This research shows how actors involved with the music’s memorialization in Brooklyn are under pressure to maintain the politics of respectability emerging from both hip-hop discourse and, concomitantly, the racial ideologies that buttress gentrification as they work to preserve the foothold the communities they work on behalf of have in Brooklyn’s socio-cultural landscape. In the process, a narrow set of terms through which these communities must forge a positive relationship with official culture during negotiations over their spatial autonomy is (re)established, reinforcing the need for recourse to flattened, essentialized social identities and the standards of white culture in order to gain leverage during such negotiations.

Jī Latīf: Sung Sufi Poetry in the Kachchh-­Sindh Borderlands

Brian Bond, CUNY Graduate Center

The Partition of India in 1947 set in motion a process by which contact between people in the region of Kachchh, now a district in the Indian state of Gujarat, and Sindh, an adjacent ethnolinguistic region in what is now Pakistan, was rendered difficult and problematic due to geopolitical concerns. In this paper, I argue that Sindhi Sufi music performance on the part of Kachchhi Muslims is a potent means for imagining, retaining, and realizing cultural, social, and historical connections with Sindh. I focus specifically on the musico­poetic legacy of the eighteenth­century Sufi Shāh ʿAbdul Latīf Bhiṭāī, who remains a deeply important figure in both regions. I examine the possible consequences that connections with Sindh have for social and geographical borderlanders, namely Muslims with cross­border allegiances living in Gujarat, where Hindu nationalism has held violent sway for almost two decades, reaching a nadir in 2002 in what has been called a Muslim pogrom. Although explicit connections to Sindh, and thus Pakistan, are often reserved for the kinds of spaces that Herzfeld (1997) has called “culturally intimate,” the rising popularity of Sufi music in India has meant that musicians are increasingly performing in public spaces throughout the country. I understand such performances as implicit, yet nonetheless amplified, counter­narratives to Hindu nationalist discourse that casts Pakistan as a nation of enemies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in summer 2014, this essay probes questions pertaining to life in a borderland, as lived by Muslim musicians.

Struttin’ Down Broad Street: Ferko String Band and Musical Legacy in the City of Brotherly Love
Karen L. Uslin, The Catholic University of America

The Philadelphia Mummers Parade is the oldest folk festival in America. To non- Philadelphians, it is an oddity—a humorous cacophony of costumes, music, and dancing. But to Philadelphians, the Mummers Parade is more than the oddities and surface humor of the parade. While the Mummers have their roots in traditions of the Scandinavian and British immigrants who came to the city, they also represent a musical and historical legacy. The parade showcases a variety of entertainment that harkens back to these early customs. But it is the string bands that are the soundtrack of this New Year’s Day tradition. The most successful band in Mummers history, the Ferko String Band, exemplifies the Mummers string band tradition: award-winning musical talent, over-the-top performances, and roots in the immigrant communities of Philadelphia. Combining various music styles such as jazz, bluegrass, and country, Ferko introduced a Philadelphia folk tradition into mainstream America in the 1940s and 1950s. However, in a twenty-first century musical world, where does Ferko fit, and is the band still a modern representation of the music of Philadelphia? In discussing the role and legacy of the Ferko String Band, this paper will attempt to answer these questions, and in turn, bring greater understanding to the musical traditions of the City of Brotherly Love.

Musically Mediating a Shared Indianness: Wedding Music and the Assertion and Negotiation of Indian-American Identity
Nandini Banerjee, Columbia University

This study explores the mediation of affective roles through wedding music practices during Hindu Indian immigrant wedding celebrations in greater New York. I use the term “mediation” in the same sense as Aaron Fox (2004) – as an all-encompassing production of links between domains of social experience. In the context of this study, wedding music connects the practical domains of everyday life with the more abstract domains of memory, ritual, and affect, and uses musically organized sound and ritual as a critical lens into the structures and values that shape immigrant cultural reproduction. I argue that communities are constructed at the experiential level through musically mediating the assertion of a shared Indianness, and through creating space for the negotiation of differences. As Indian immigrants strive to create a place for themselves in their new home, how do different desires for social status, economic success, and national identity come into conflict with each other? In what ways do music and ritual help these communities navigate their individual musical and social ties to their homeland? By focusing on the presence of event production companies and their DJs, instrumental and oral traditions that have been passed down for generations, and songs from Bollywood films, I use intimate ethnography and musical analysis to illuminate the ways in which weddings become a site for cultural mediation, and how music and ritual support and complicate the lives of Indian immigrants.

Ethnographic Inflections in John Cage’s Roaratorio, An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake

Ivan Goff, New York University

Although amalgamations of Irish folk music and new music are not uncommon today, the implications of such cross-genre experiments are largely unaddressed in ethnomusicology. Roaratorio, An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, a provocative montage of the Irish aural originally composed for radio by John Cage in 1979, is a compelling compositional prototype that urges the redress of this historical and theoretical neglect. In line with Cage's own instruction set ("___, a Circus on ___"), Roaratorio combines mesostics from Finnegans Wake as spoken word, Irish traditional music repertoire performed live by solo musicians and traditional singer, and pre- recorded found sounds collected from hundreds of places mentioned in Joyce's text. One might expect that Cage's aleatory, central aims of which, in this case, are deliberate ambiguity and fragmentation, would deliver a convincing fusion of musical genres. Yet the sounds of Irish traditional instruments and voices in Roaratorio clearly maintain a connection to their folk roots: melodies are recognizably intact, there is no technological manipulation of the sound of the acoustic instruments, and the identity of performers are clearly evidenced through their signature performance styles. In Cage's surreal sonic presentation, the image of the folk musician as ethnographic object is inadvertently preserved and propagated. This image is counterpointed with Cage's ethnographic depiction of place through sound. Roaratorio therefore evidences starkly competing ethnographic registers and strategies, an analysis that raises broader questions for Irish music study and suggests possible lines of inquiry for historical ethnomusicology more generally .

Sounding Japan-China Relations: Hearing Imperialism in the 1939 Film Song of the White Orchid
Nathanial Gailey-Schiltz, University of Maryland, College Park

During the 1930s and 40s, as Japan moved towards total war in the Pacific, all of its national resources were funneled into the war effort. This included things like material production, but also the production and maintenance of popular sentiment in line with the ideology of the war effort. In this paper, I'll examine musical choices within one particular Japanese film, 1939's Song of the White Orchid (白蘭の 歌), arguing that the film’s music worked to bolster Japanese morale in regards to Japanese military presence in Manchuria and confirm the party line about the relationship between Japanese and Chinese people. Famous singer Ri Kōran (also known as Li Xianglan and Shirley Yamaguchi) stars as a personification of this complex relationship. As a production of its time Song of the White Orchid does not have constant background scoring, but songs and other musical effects happen at several key moments throughout the film,

and. Japanese popular music, Chinese style singing, and Hollywood-style effects are all part of the repertoire, together reinforcing the film's themes while appealing to a cosmopolitan Japanese audience. Source materials for this paper include the film itself and materials from the Gordon W. Prange Collection at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Song to Romania: The Biopolitics of a Socialist Spectacle

Ben Dumbauld, CUNY Graduate Center

In the summer of 1971, Nicolae Ceaușescu delivered two speeches that would fundamentally alter the cultural atmosphere of socialist Romania. Inspired by his visit to communist East Asia earlier that year, these “July theses,” as they were termed later, initiated a “mini-cultural revolution” in the country, leading to increased censorship and a renewed emphasis on socialist-realist aesthetics. Five years later, the musical component of this project emerged as “Song to Romania,” a bi-annual music festival developed to foster a network of mass musical activities throughout the country. Most academic accounts of “Song to Romania” speak to its political function at a semiotic level. Giurchescu (1987) describes the festival as a means to mask the inherent contradictions of the socialist system through the invocation of national “master symbols,” while Oancea (2007) – also drawn to political semiology – argues that it functioned to cultivate a sense of shared national identity. In this presentation I consider how “Song to Romania” additionally operated on a biopolitical level. As I will argue, mass performance as a unique social phenomenon offers the possibility of what Agamben (2013) terms “form-of-life,” or the complete unification of a person’s biology with their political subjectivity. In this regard, “Song to Romania” operated as a means for participants to perform as ideal socialist citizens, and by so doing rendering the juridical enforcement of socialist-nationalist ideology nonessential. To illustrate this process I will draw from my fieldwork with Romanian interlocutors who performed in such events.

Ethnomusicology and Royalty: an Unprecedented Organological Study Presented by a Spanish Princess at the End of the 19th Century
Maria Luisa Martínez Martínez, Universidad de Jaén, Spain & The Foundation for Iberian Music, CUNY Graduate Center

During the school year 1892/1893, a complete collection of Spanish popular musical instruments was donated to the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid (RCSMM). This contribution was made by the eldest daughter of Queen Elisabeth II, Princess María Isabel Francisca de Borbón y Borbón (1851-1931), who received a distinguished musical education. Currently, the location of these instruments is unknown. However, through the course of my research, I have discovered that the RCSMM Library keeps in its archive an unpublished and unknown book titled, “Colección de instrumentos populares de España” [Collection of popular instruments in Spain] (S/1799). This is a handwritten organological study of sixty-eight pages that includes a classification and description of the most outstanding instruments in Spanish popular music together with several musical scores. This work is notated as having been presented by Princess María Isabel Francisca de Borbón y Borbón and may have accompanied the missing collection. I argue that the unpublished book is a truly unique document: an unprecedented ethnomusicological study presented by a very influential woman in the Spanish royal court at the end of the 19th century, a moment in history that coincides with the first ethnomusicological works published by Felipe Pedrell (1841-1922) and the emerging Spanish musical nationalism represented by composers such as Isaac Albéniz (1860- 1909) and Enrique Granados (1867-1916), both of whom were very close to the royalty and to Princess Isabel.

“It’s not a mirage this time”: Museums, Performance, and the Production of Space in “Rue Créole”
Laura Donnelly, University of Pennsylvania

The cultural complexity- and potential for identity building- of museums and cultural displays can be powerful spaces of cultural negotiation; in a postcolonial or diasporic setting, the production of locality through cultural displays can serve as a home surrogate (albeit temporarily) for deterritorialized peripheral subjects, including French Antilleans living in Paris. However, when these productions (whether they be museums, festivals, or other events of representation) are commoditized and sponsored by socially dominant groups (such as the French government), so that outsiders (non- diasporic people, i.e., the general public) can consume them, it precipitates interactions and clashes of a polyrhthymic and performatively doubled nature.Through an ethnography of such a production, Rue Créole, a weekend-long French Antillean cultural festival at La Villette in Paris in 2011, this paper will illustrate the production of locality in Rue Créole through the spatial construction of the venue, and examine the production of space and its implications within the festival’s musical performances. The performers, first Akiyo, a Guadeloupean group performing carnival gwo ka, and then Kali, a Martinican performer who plays an eclectic blend of Caribbean genres highlight the diverse possibilities for spatial production and its potential clashes and layerings in such a setting. Ultimately, I argue that in postcolonial or diasporic spaces, the polyrhythmic and performatively doubled nature of the produced spaces and their clashes is itself a mark of colonial relation.

Indexing Morality: Voice, Self, and Divine Guidance in Mabebasan Literary Performance Nicole Reisnour, Cornell University

The voice is widely recognized as a deeply moral instrument. Recent anthropological research has shown that moral self-formation involves developing capacities to perform, recognize, and be affected by different linguistic registers and vocal styles; and linguistic anthropologists have highlighted the role of semiotic ideologies in linking particular vocal and gestural styles to social identities and value systems (Bauman and Briggs 2003, Hill 1985, Hirschkind 2006, Keane 2007). In this paper I consider some of the ways in which semiotic ideologies enable and constrain Balinese Hindu capacities for moral-self fashioning, drawing examples from my research on mabebasan. Mabebasan is an oral literary practice in which performers sing and interpret Kawi, Sanskrit, and Balinese-language religious texts. Since the 1970s the Indonesian Ministry of Religion has promoted mabebasan as part of a larger project of religious reform aimed at placing the self, rather than ritual, at the center of Hindu religiosity. Performed during religious rituals, on interactive radio and television programs, and in state- sponsored competitions, mabebasan is officially touted as a popular form of religious self-cultivation, through which participants internalize divinely-revealed moral lessons. Many mabebasan performers however are less interested in studying the contents of religious texts than in using these texts to aurally channel divine presence. This paper explores some of the tensions that arise as mabebasan performers and promoters work to construct a vocal and gestural style that indexes a devout Hindu self at a time when the semiotics of Balinese Hindu morality are highly contested.

A Heretic Becomes a Hero: Korean (Traditional) Musicians in a Transnational Circuit

Hyunjin Yeo, University of Maryland, College Park

In the early 2000s, an increasing number of musicians trained in Korean traditional music (gugak) started to perform at music festivals around the world. While most of them have ended up in a one-time performance, recently some musicians have gained an even greater popularity outside Korea. In this paper, focusing on Jambinai, regarded as one of the most successful Korean music groups who have performed abroad, I investigate what aspects of their music appeal to the foreign audience—even more than the Korean audience—making them a group that many international festivals are eager to invite. It might be the local tint found in their music which piques the audiences’ curiosity on first hearing them (Harvey 1990; Stokes 2004). I argue, however, that it is a sense of simultaneous familiarity and distance that eventually prevents their music from being associated with one specific genre. On the contrary, I contend that because it has been labeled as gugak, the same music has elicited different responses from the Korean audiences. I suggest that their music is in fact an example of “cosmopolitan striving”—a collective motivation to be a citizen in the world, deriving from Korea’s unique history and current position in the world (Park and Abelmann 2004). By examining Jambinai and looking at culture-specific reasons for their success, this paper will provide a new perspective for studying Korean music in a transnational context and show how Korean music has come to be circulated in the larger context of global music markets.

Transmission, Tradition, and Translation in the Iraqi Maqām

Bradford J. Garvey, CUNY Graduate Center

The current practice of the Iraqi maqām (Ar. maqām al-‘irāqī), the urban art song of Iraq, is a historical product of the lived experiences of its performers, who have been accumulating its components, shaping its formal foundations, and implementing their aesthetic principles in a genealogical format since at least the 17th CE/10th AH century. The social transmission of the Iraqi maqām is of central importance to the social reproduction of the repertoire, but remains poorly understood – more often caricatured than investigated. In this presentation, I survey recent Iraqi historiographical literature to reveal the ways in which Iraqi scholars conceive of the Iraqi maqām tradition and its transmission, as they debate the role of individual artists, trace lineages of performers, relay hagiographic anecdotes of transmission, and present biographical sketches of influential artists. I argue that performers and audiences understand the Iraqi maqām as a cumulative and iterative repertoire in process rather than progress. The performance of the maqām is, instead, continually refracted by individual exponents, not progressing towards any sense of formal cohesion, textual completion, or final synthesis. Each link in the chain of transmission affords fertile ground for negotiation of the Iraqi maqām on the part of practitioners, audiences, and critics. To illustrate this, I offer several comparative musical analyses that concretely reveal the extent of communal sharedness and individual divergence from the introductory musical theme of the most important of the Iraqi maqāmāt, rāst.

Examples of vocal and instrumental music of the Gilan

Sara Banihashemi, University of Hamburg

In Iran there are thirty one regions, with more than ten different ethnic groups in total, each with its own culture, language, art, and, of course, music. One of these regions is Gilan in the north of Iran, along the Caspian Sea, with an Area of 14,042 Km2 and a population of 2,404,861 (as of 2006). Two main ethnic groups can be found here: Tāleš in the west and Gilak in the east. This small region, with its fascinating cultural identities, is the field of my dissertation. Folklore music of Iran, despite its varieties, is still an unknown field, requiring more attention from ethnomusicologists before it gets lost forever. It is already too late for some of these varieties, which no longer exist due to modernity and urbanization. In my Presentation, I will explore the vocal and instrumental music in Gilan and the various Tāleš and Gilak singing and playing methods. Record, films and pictures from my fieldwork will help the audience get a sense of this theme. This music depicts the lifestyle of nature- oriented people, living in forests, on mountains and in the coastal regions of the Caspian Sea. My research focuses on the role of music in everyday life and its connection to social activities and events. I would like to explore how important music is, both vocal and instrumental, on occasions such as wakes, rituals, sports and entertainments, weddings, and religious ceremonies.

Program Committee, MACSEM 2015:

Shalini Ayyagari, American University Mark Lamanno, Swarthmore University
Nancy Groce, Library of Congress
Kendra Salois (Chair and MACSEM Vice-President), University of Maryland, College Park

Current MACSEM Officers

President: Andy McGraw, University of Richmond
Vice President: Kendra Salois, University of Maryland, College Park
Treasurer: Jim Sykes, University of Pennsylvania
Secretary: Nathanial Gailey-Schlitz, University of Maryland, College Park Student Representative: Patricia Vergara, University of Maryland, College Park

For More Information, Please Contact

David Samuels
Local Arrangements Chair New York University dws2004@nyu.edu

Andy McGraw MACSEM President University of Richmond 804-287-1807 (office) amcgraw@richmond.edu

MACSEM 2014

Special Thanks to:

Music Department, New York University

The Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University

Campus Map:

http://www.nyu.edu/footer/map.html